It sounds funny, I
know, I've often said, Go back three generations and everybody in North Louisiana is kin to everybody else, by blood or marriage. I had not guessed how true my "old man's wisdom" might really be until I got turned back recently into my copy of the genealogy, "The Kelly Family of Yesterday and Today," compiled and issued back in 1998 by my distant (don't make me count) blood cousins, Jimmy A., Jr., and Kathy LeMay Kelly of Trout, over in neighboring LaSalle Parish, Louisiana. My pursuit of details in the genealogy was prompted while preparing the story (in this edition) of the late Henry Elijah (Lige) Wilkerson, a railroad worker and timber buyer for the Tremont Lumber Company at Old Joyce, during the timbering days of the early and mid-1900's. The story was furnished by his daughter, Mrs. Anne Lasyone Futch, founder and co-owner of Lasyone Insurance Agency in downtown Winnfield. My "kinfolks" circuits kicked in, upon learning that Mrs. Futch, who was Anne Wilkerson, has a personal connection to the history of the long-since abandoned Old Joyce school in Winn Parish, where my father was a young newly-married teacher back at the end of the 1920s, and where I myself was born, in the Dark Ages of the Great Depression in 1931. I have little personal recollection of Old Joyce, since the family moved to Gaar's Mill during my first year of life, when my father took a new teaching job at the Gaar's Mill school in the fall of 1931. I have only a single vague memory of visiting some relative or other at Old Joyce as a lad of maybe five or seven or nine after we had already left for residence in New Orleans, or were just getting ready to go. That recollection was somehow connected to a visit with relatives. And the relatives, it seemed, were Wilkersons. Now, as I was growing up, there was a line in one of my father's family "scripts" that "Aunt, (or cousin) somebody or other . . . married a Wilkerson from Joyce . . . " The coincident connection to the Old Joyce School, and the Wilkerson family name from an era that was in the right century, at least, suggested that there might by a "kinfolks" connection to the present day Wilkerson-Lasyone family. That's when I made a fast check in the pages of the Kelly genealogy. My first discovery put me in the right tree, but alas, it turned out to be on a different branch . . . The right story is, a first cousin of whom I have no recollection, Alice Etta Kelly, born to my uncle Jasper Washington Kelly in 1897, married John E. Wilkerson, son of George and Lowanna Wilkerson, on November 28, 1917. Another son of George Wilkerson, Lige Wilkerson, married Bertha Mae Taylor, daughter of Rev. William R. Taylor, also in 1917. One of the daughters of Lige Wilkerson is, of course, Anne Wilkerson Lasyone Futch. Making her a niece of a cousin by marriage of mine. OK so far? While Anne Wilkerson and I are not related by blood, we are both kin to a lot of the same people in the next generations, and thus qualify for what is sometimes called in the South "Shirttail kin," or "Peach Orchard kin," to give a couple of the common names for such relationships. Jasper W. Kelly, born July 7, 1876, father of Alice Etta Kelly Wilkerson, and my father, Troy Kelly, born 26 years later on August 12, 1902, were the oldest and youngest of the eight children of James Thomas and Sarah Anne Gates Kelly, and were grandsons of William Nathaniel (Bill) and Elizabeth White Kelly, he born in 1823 in Georgia. So, how kin are you and I? On a whim, I made a quick "unaudited" count of the family names in the Kelly genealogy index . . . descended by blood or marriage from the Bill and Elizabeth White Kelly marriage. There are more than 700 separate family names in that list in the seven generations of marriages and offspring documented through the end of the 1990s only--names as common as Bermuda grass all across the Piney Woods. I have no doubt that if the Wilkerson and Taylor lines from which Anne Wilkerson Lasyone Futch came, were traced in the same detail, hundreds of relationships would cross and recross . . . and that my original "old man's wisdom" would prove more than true . . . that everyone in North Louisiana is pretty much kin, whether we know or like our relatives or not. And knowing as much as I do about the twists and turns in my own relatives' background, an old country song which I recall from days listening to the Grand Ole Opry as a youth seems appropriate . . . I may have become my own grandpaw! (For those with sound-equipped digital devices and Internet connection, go to www.ziplo.com/grandpa.htm to bring it all back.) |